Re: polarization and swinging between Republicans and Democrats. I feel the voting system (ie first past the post) causes this. Europe predominantly switched to Proportional Representation. Rather than framing issues as us vs them or good vs bad, in that environment, multiple parties can get into more nuanced conversations. A given party needs to talk about what good ideas they have and why they should be voted for rather than simply talking about how bad the other guy is. Generally speaking minority governments come out of this system and then, discussions need to happen on what policies are best. With this comes more long term thinking and less thrashing back and forth, term to term, and throwing the baby out with the bath water.
At one point David says "if you build enough solar, right, you had this enormous excess—
Lily Bermel: Mm-hmm
David Roberts: During the day, which right now is a lot of it is just getting curtailed all over the place." And go on to mention batteries.
NO, "right now a lot is.." NOT "getting curtailed all over the place. "This gives the impression that there is already too much solar. Curtailment is something like 2-3% of utility solar nationwide. Sure more in a few concentrated areas. It can sound like "a lot" because solar produces "a lot" already so 2-3% seems like "a lot" of GWh. ERCOT in 2025 curtailment total was about 6% of solar generation. CAISO keeps track but all I find w/quick search is 10% or so mostly during late spring when there is also extra hydro in its grid.
If there were no curtailment, there would be no need for storage. Also, a lot of "firm" generation being actually inflexible baseload, we are curtailing solar while still running nukes, coal and combined cycle gas. Hydro also is "flexible" but does have a floor. Supposedly some of this is needed for grid "system strength" but that can almost certainly be met with grid forming inverters on batteries and VRE.
Also for a variety of reasons, "4 hour" batteries can and are being charged by solar during the day and discharged out into the a.m. hours.
For the past 15 years, the wind & solar tax credits have not been "innovation" credits they have been an inverse carbon tax, or a clean generation credit or whatever. To say only "innovative" tech should get these credits is absurd. And "exports," give me a break.
Much of what she says is absurd to me. But it's part of the Beltway jive I find loathsome and counterproductive. I don't trust these folks with "permitting reform" because I'm sure they will "reform" permitting for everything except wind and solar, and just wait batteries will be the next target. (Or not, because batteries can store un-needed power from those "clean firm, i.e. inflexible baseload powerplants during the many times its not needed.)
The "wind and solar and batteries are cheap, cheap, cheap already" narrative is just not true. Maybe some TX solar w/o batteries is cheap. But recent bids and discussions I've heard are in the $0.10+/kWh at the interconnect for US solar/battery or onshore wind projects. (We are more expensive than surveys of the world lead one to believe. Interest rates, risk factors from feds to RTO/ISO changes, tiny town protests not just permitting but overall policy, tariffs, FEOC, component bans.... )
Thanks for pushing back partially.
David, one place I think you miss the mark. You repeat the "no new gas generation" mantra. There is still a lot of coal out there that is online during peak demand, and low renewable output. Like here in CO. Just in CO, it would take Tens of Billions of Dollars of Storage to firm/backup all those hours reliably. Much of it would be sitting idle most of the year, just like your critique of gas backup. But as far as I can tell, all the gas backup we would need to shut down the coal, get to 90ish% wind-solar-storage, is a couple or few billion, depending on the $/W of gas on a given week. If we build out all this transmission for backup for the Dunkleflaute, it is also idle, or at very low capacity, most of the time.
What is it with these folks and the geo-hype? Whaaaa, solar got 50x the "support" as geo. Guess what, it produces 5000x the electricity, and a lot of that support is tax credits in the last two years for solar projects that will generate for 20-35 years in their first generation, and after that, be repowered with perovskite-silicon sandwich panels with 40% more W/sf.
While the couple GW of geo will have depleted the thermal reservoirs and thrown a billion GJ of waste heat into the air.
They're certainly cheaper than building new gas, if they weren't 90% of new generation wouldn't be renewables, but it is.
The cost for solar and batteries will definitely continue to fall significantly year over year, so if it isn't cheap, cheap, cheap now, it will be.
Wind has shown to be quite a bit more sensitive to the cost of capital, but that cost will drop at some point, and when it does, absent the current insane hate for wind in the White House, wind generation will expand at a rapid pace and it will be quite cheap.
I'm really frustrated with the clean 'firm' frame. The need for this is much smaller than people are making it out to be. Also, are we really calling gas power 'clean'? Fracked gas is anything but clean and just as bad as coal when leaking methane is included (why wouldn't it be).
Valuing results is fine but it is easy to achieve durable results if you don't try much. What the world needs are durable results that make significant progress avoiding the rapidly accelerating climate catastrophe. So tell us what you think that is Lily. Permit reform is currently being hammered out, support for geothermal subsidies is unlikely to provide significant capacity quickly, grid buildout is already a well known necessity, reducing fossil fuel carbon intensity is just another way to keep fossil fuel around longer than we can afford for it to be. I think Lilly needs to wake up and smell the hummus! Let's start by taxing billionaires and fossil fuel companies and us that to accelerate all the various known solutions discussed in this podcast!
If renewable tax breaks are on the table to be bargained away, we ought to demand at bare minimum reducing fossil-fuel tax breaks.
The relative cost of renewables will continue to improve even without tax incentives, speeding that trend even a little by reducing fossil-fuel tax breaks seems like something to put firmly on the negotiating table.
We ended up purchasing a generator to ensure we had dispatch-able generation back in CA. No grid meant no output from our PV panels which meant no power to run the well.
Re: polarization and swinging between Republicans and Democrats. I feel the voting system (ie first past the post) causes this. Europe predominantly switched to Proportional Representation. Rather than framing issues as us vs them or good vs bad, in that environment, multiple parties can get into more nuanced conversations. A given party needs to talk about what good ideas they have and why they should be voted for rather than simply talking about how bad the other guy is. Generally speaking minority governments come out of this system and then, discussions need to happen on what policies are best. With this comes more long term thinking and less thrashing back and forth, term to term, and throwing the baby out with the bath water.
https://environmentamerica.org/california/media-center/release-100-days-renewable/
RELEASE: California experiences its 100th day of renewable energy sources meeting 100% of electricity demand - that was 2024.
Sorry, another thing. Try to make it brief.
At one point David says "if you build enough solar, right, you had this enormous excess—
Lily Bermel: Mm-hmm
David Roberts: During the day, which right now is a lot of it is just getting curtailed all over the place." And go on to mention batteries.
NO, "right now a lot is.." NOT "getting curtailed all over the place. "This gives the impression that there is already too much solar. Curtailment is something like 2-3% of utility solar nationwide. Sure more in a few concentrated areas. It can sound like "a lot" because solar produces "a lot" already so 2-3% seems like "a lot" of GWh. ERCOT in 2025 curtailment total was about 6% of solar generation. CAISO keeps track but all I find w/quick search is 10% or so mostly during late spring when there is also extra hydro in its grid.
If there were no curtailment, there would be no need for storage. Also, a lot of "firm" generation being actually inflexible baseload, we are curtailing solar while still running nukes, coal and combined cycle gas. Hydro also is "flexible" but does have a floor. Supposedly some of this is needed for grid "system strength" but that can almost certainly be met with grid forming inverters on batteries and VRE.
Also for a variety of reasons, "4 hour" batteries can and are being charged by solar during the day and discharged out into the a.m. hours.
For the past 15 years, the wind & solar tax credits have not been "innovation" credits they have been an inverse carbon tax, or a clean generation credit or whatever. To say only "innovative" tech should get these credits is absurd. And "exports," give me a break.
Much of what she says is absurd to me. But it's part of the Beltway jive I find loathsome and counterproductive. I don't trust these folks with "permitting reform" because I'm sure they will "reform" permitting for everything except wind and solar, and just wait batteries will be the next target. (Or not, because batteries can store un-needed power from those "clean firm, i.e. inflexible baseload powerplants during the many times its not needed.)
The "wind and solar and batteries are cheap, cheap, cheap already" narrative is just not true. Maybe some TX solar w/o batteries is cheap. But recent bids and discussions I've heard are in the $0.10+/kWh at the interconnect for US solar/battery or onshore wind projects. (We are more expensive than surveys of the world lead one to believe. Interest rates, risk factors from feds to RTO/ISO changes, tiny town protests not just permitting but overall policy, tariffs, FEOC, component bans.... )
Thanks for pushing back partially.
David, one place I think you miss the mark. You repeat the "no new gas generation" mantra. There is still a lot of coal out there that is online during peak demand, and low renewable output. Like here in CO. Just in CO, it would take Tens of Billions of Dollars of Storage to firm/backup all those hours reliably. Much of it would be sitting idle most of the year, just like your critique of gas backup. But as far as I can tell, all the gas backup we would need to shut down the coal, get to 90ish% wind-solar-storage, is a couple or few billion, depending on the $/W of gas on a given week. If we build out all this transmission for backup for the Dunkleflaute, it is also idle, or at very low capacity, most of the time.
What is it with these folks and the geo-hype? Whaaaa, solar got 50x the "support" as geo. Guess what, it produces 5000x the electricity, and a lot of that support is tax credits in the last two years for solar projects that will generate for 20-35 years in their first generation, and after that, be repowered with perovskite-silicon sandwich panels with 40% more W/sf.
While the couple GW of geo will have depleted the thermal reservoirs and thrown a billion GJ of waste heat into the air.
Re: wind/solar/batteries are cheap
They're certainly cheaper than building new gas, if they weren't 90% of new generation wouldn't be renewables, but it is.
The cost for solar and batteries will definitely continue to fall significantly year over year, so if it isn't cheap, cheap, cheap now, it will be.
Wind has shown to be quite a bit more sensitive to the cost of capital, but that cost will drop at some point, and when it does, absent the current insane hate for wind in the White House, wind generation will expand at a rapid pace and it will be quite cheap.
I'm really frustrated with the clean 'firm' frame. The need for this is much smaller than people are making it out to be. Also, are we really calling gas power 'clean'? Fracked gas is anything but clean and just as bad as coal when leaking methane is included (why wouldn't it be).
Valuing results is fine but it is easy to achieve durable results if you don't try much. What the world needs are durable results that make significant progress avoiding the rapidly accelerating climate catastrophe. So tell us what you think that is Lily. Permit reform is currently being hammered out, support for geothermal subsidies is unlikely to provide significant capacity quickly, grid buildout is already a well known necessity, reducing fossil fuel carbon intensity is just another way to keep fossil fuel around longer than we can afford for it to be. I think Lilly needs to wake up and smell the hummus! Let's start by taxing billionaires and fossil fuel companies and us that to accelerate all the various known solutions discussed in this podcast!
Re: permitting reform is being hammered out
If renewable tax breaks are on the table to be bargained away, we ought to demand at bare minimum reducing fossil-fuel tax breaks.
The relative cost of renewables will continue to improve even without tax incentives, speeding that trend even a little by reducing fossil-fuel tax breaks seems like something to put firmly on the negotiating table.
Hope the powers that be in Washington D. C. will encourage Vehicle to Home adaption.
https://www.home-adviser.com/energy/vehicle-to-home-in-2025-a-practical-guide-to-bidirectional-ev-backup-and-load-shift
We ended up purchasing a generator to ensure we had dispatch-able generation back in CA. No grid meant no output from our PV panels which meant no power to run the well.